Obituary: Herman Groves (1927-2010)

December 23, 2010

Television writer Herman Groves died on December 5 at the age of 83. According to the death notice in the Los Angeles Times, Groves was born September 21, 1927, in Baltimore.

Groves was one of those rank-and-file episodic TV writers who could maneuver through the conventions of a given genre with dexterity, recombining the pieces into new plots without ever departing from the basic formula. He specialized first in westerns and then in crime shows, as the popularity of one gave way to the other. His last credit, on Airwolf in 1984, came around the time that American dramatic television shifted toward more complex, character-driven narratives.

Groves wrote for The Restless Gun, Bonanza, Riverboat, Tate, The Rifleman, and Have Gun – Will Travel, for which he turned Richard Connell’s oft-filmed The Most Dangerous Game into an adventure for Paladin. Then came SurfSide 6, The Detectives, The F.B.I., Hawaii Five-O (a couple of worthy first-season episodes, then back as a story editor in the mid-seventies), Harry O (including the one with Maureen McCormick as a junkie), The Bionic Woman, Vega$, and The Dukes of Hazzard.

I’m tempted to joke that Groves wrote for every bad television show made between the fifties and the eighties, but in fact he also landed assignments on a few good ones: Mr. Novak, The Untouchables, The Name of the Game. He wrote four Bewitched episodes and a number of shows for Disney in the seventies. Groves was also a story editor on several other series, from Daniel Boone to Fantasy Island, and co-created the short-lived The Contender with Robert Dozier.

I wish I could do more than summarize Groves’s credits, but there’s hardly any literature about him, and I never met the man. Although I did come close. The only time I’ve ever been to the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills was in 2004, when I was invited out to meet another writer who lived there, in the Fran & Ray Stark Villa. The Stark Villa is an assisted living facility, not a hospital, and most of its residents are in reasonably good health. And all of them, I found out once I got there, had little nameplates next to their doors: undoubtedly a way to help the staff get the right pills into the right mouths, but also an unintended boon to nosy historians. So when my interview concluded, I couldn’t resist the temptation to “browse.” I walked the whole floor, and recognized a number of the names. One of them was Herman Groves. I almost knocked, but I didn’t have his credits in front of me and wasn’t prepared with my usual detailed questions. So I let it slide, and scurried off before I could be collared by a suspicious orderly. I shoulda knocked.

Thanks for the blog post about my dad, Stephen. I have more info about him if you’re interested. So many stories… he started as a boom operator at MGM, wrote a spec script, and the rest followed. He also attended USC.